New features
Ubuntu 18.04 bionic support
Our team has released Kurento 6.10.0, which can now be installed in Ubuntu 18.04 systems. This is a milestone we’ve been working on for quite some time, and we finally believe we’re ready to launch official support for the newest Ubuntu LTS version. Deployment section in OpenVidu Docs is properly updated to inform about this.
We still consider Ubuntu Bionic to be in a preliminary support state, and some bugs may appear. In fact, we know for sure there’s one limitation: no OpenCV filters will work in Ubuntu 18.04 at this moment. OpenVidu has supported audio and video filters for a long time now, and it is a cool feature that allows developers to implement some advanced audio and video real-time processing in the server side. But unfortunately Kurento has not been updated yet to support it in Bionic, so no FaceOverlayFilter or ChromaFilter will work in new Ubuntu version. But you can still use GStreamer filters!
OpenVidu Server boot process greatly improved
OpenVidu Server now checks all requiered conditions at boot time, which helps solving missconfiguration problems when deploying on Ubuntu. This includes every requirement related to permissions and installed software. If something is missing, wrong or there are not enough permissions in certain path, the OpenVidu Server process immediately exits with a clear description about what happened and a possible solution to fix it.
In our experience, this makes the process of installing OpenVidu Server directly in Ubuntu so much easier and manageable.
OpenVidu reconnection to Kurento Media Server
If OpenVidu Server loses its connection to Kurento Media Server, now it will try to reconnect automatically. When it does so, if it is a new instance of Kurento, every stream of every previously active session will be destroyed with reason mediaServerDisconnect and every active recording will be stopped with same reason, but your users will not be disconnected from your sessions. This way you can directly re-publish and re-subscribe any desired stream right away.
This may help in case Kurento crashes: your users will have lost their media connections, but they will still be connected to their OpenVidu sessions and will only have to re-establish streams once OpenVidu Server is connected to a new Kurento instance.
OpenVidu upgrade process
Do you want to upgrade your OpenVidu deployment? Now you have a section entirely dedicated to it in the documentation. If you have deployed OpenVidu in AWS, it’s as easy as launching a single command. If you have chosen Ubuntu deployment, then you will have to manually run some commands. Either way, you have available proper instructions now.
Native screen-sharing for Chrome
OpenVidu has supported native screen-sharing for Firefox since its inception, but Google decided to have Chrome require an extension to allow screen-sharing. Finally they changed their mind and brought Chrome up to the standard, supporting getDisplayMedia API.
So, our client library openvidu-browser now supports native screen-sharing for Chrome≥72. No extension needed for these browsers!
OpenVidu Call improvements
Our best demo application has been updated with some exciting new features:
- Users can now share their webcam and their screen at the same time.
- The chat is better integrated now.
- You can enlarge as many videos as you want, not just one. Available space will be automatically managed by the application for best fit.
- Preview window for camera and mic selection has undergone many necessary fixes. Now it works fine in every OS and client supported by OpenVidu.
- openvidu-call-ionic (Ionic version of OpenVidu Call for mobile devices) now supports Ionic 4 and works fine in iOS.
Bug fixes
- For COMPOSED recording with video, when multiple screen sharing streams were being published it crashed. Now it doesn’t.
- For COMPOSED recordings with video, when stopping them immediatley after started, sometimes the generated video file would not be playable. Now in this cases failed status is set to this recordings, so you can take care of them properly.
- After manually stopping ALWAYS recordings (sessions that are automatically recorded once first publisher starts) in an ongoing session, now publishing a stream when no publishers are active in the session won’t start automatically a new recording.
- Active sessions retrieval now returns sessions created with REST API or server SDKs that have not received any client connection (before this fix they would not be returned until some user had connected to it)
- Call Detail Record: recordingStopped event for INDIVIDUAL recordings wasn’t updating their duration and size values (both properties had value 0)
- streamPropertyChanged event was firing an exception in the browser for streams for which a user wasn’t subscribed to.
- Avoid 500 error when sending no body on POST operations of the REST API, such as POST /api/sessions
- Minor bug fixes in openvidu-java-client.
OpenVidu Pro
We are excited to announce OpenVidu Pro: a commercial tier for OpenVidu platform.
Don’t panic! OpenVidu will remain as an open-source project, with an Apache-2.0 license so you can use it any way you want. But we need some sort of revenue to keep working on our beloved project. As our brand new OpenVidu Pro documentation states:
OpenVidu is an open source project, and for sure will remain this way in the future. But OpenVidu team needs some source of income to continue working on this amazing project. The approach we’ll be taking here is pretty straightforward: OpenVidu features themselves will always be open source, and only some tools or improvements related to production environments may end up being part of OpenVidu Pro stack. To sum up:
You will always be able to access OpenVidu awesome features and build whatever you want with them. Our intention is to make OpenVidu platform long-term sustainable by offering advanced production stage monitoring and management tools for those companies interested in such capabilities.
So, what does OpenVidu Pro offer in comparison with OpenVidu Community Edition? Our intention is to work on automated scalability and fault-tolerance, offering ready-to-go production set ups for those companies interested in a more robust environment. OpenVidu Pro will be able to dinamically grow to support changing user load.
But I’m talking in future tense. That’s because scalability and fault-tolerance are still work-in-progress features. We are for now offering OpenVidu Pro free of charge, as we consider it still a beta version. So, what does it offer right now?
OpenVidu Inspector
OpenVidu Pro comes with an advanced dashboard that will help you monitor and administrate your ongoing sessions and your past sessions. You can also manage your recordings, your OpenVidu system configuration and you can test your deployment, all in one place.
Detailed session monitoring
We have integrated Elasticsearch and Kibana in OpenVidu Pro. This way we are able to store any relevant event generated in OpenVidu in Elasticsearch that can be later visualized through Kibana. We have assembled two beatuiful dashboards with useful information about sessions and recordings respectively, but you will be able to create your own graphs by using the power of Kibana.
This is some serious monitoring right here!
Take a look at OpenVidu Pro documentation. There you have explained everything you need to know about this exciting new chapter for us. And don’t worry, we won’t give up OpenVidu Community Edition. That’s our core and we need it powerful, updated and free of bugs ;)
